The Glamour of Faraway Places—and the Means to Get There—Inspire Exquisite Flights of Fancy

Remember that great travel sequence in Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face, in which Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire and Kay Thompson, all impeccably dressed and (in Thompson’s case) sporting proper white gloves, swept down the steps from a TWA Constellation and rushed off to the Eiffel Tower to the tune of “Bonjour, Paris!” Remember steamer trunks, deck chairs, observation cars? Remember the Concorde?

Hard as it may seem to recall in these days of security lines, luggage restrictions and red-eye business flights, there was a time—and not all that long ago —when it was positively fun to travel. Fun to discover strange places and fun to get there in the first place. You dressed up to travel—in a chic suit and even a hat; you had matching luggage that you stowed in a hold or a baggage car instead of trying to lug it with you and cram it into an overhead compartment. You ate your meals in a dining car and looked out at the view.

No wonder that travelers used to memorialize their journeys—not just with photographs and postcards but with something more substantial and festive, like a piece of jewelry. “Travel for tourists, as opposed to gentlemen taking an educational grand tour, really didn’t begin until the later Victorian period,” says Suzanne Martinez, a gemologist and jewelry historian at San Francisco’s Lang Antiques. “But when it caught on, tourists wanted to bring back trinkets commemorating their travels. And by the 1940s and ’50s, when charm bracelets were all the rage, tourists wanted iconic charms that would remind them of the places they’d seen.” They also wanted to celebrate the means of transportation—the carriages and steamships and sailboats, and later the automobiles and airplanes—that took them there.

In the beginning, of course, travel was for the very few: It was difficult and expensive and required substantial leisure time to get from place to place and stay there. And the jewels that commemorate such travels are likewise rarefied, utilizing precious and semiprecious stones and intricate settings. Such pieces were a specialty of jewelers like Fabergé and his epigones, and they often featured articulated parts (spinning wheels or swinging doors on carriages, for instance) or gemstones deployed as amusingly out-of-scale elements—automobile windows or headlamps made out of a single diamond, or luggage stickers fashioned from sapphires or other colored stones. A pavéd diamond pin in the shape of an ocean liner might have waves made of semicircular lapis lazulis lapping the length of its hull; and a stylish cabriolet, also pavéd with diamonds, might have a window made out of a square-cut aquamarine.

But as technology brought travel, and the means of travel, within reach of a wider public, travel jewelry became less ornate, more tooled. The first automobile pins or tie clips were bejeweled affairs encrusted with diamonds or rubies; but by the 1930s the look of such objects had become streamlined—almost to the point of abstraction. A gold bracelet made of a fleet of sleek, low-slung coupes, for example, appears to be composed simply of figured links—it’s only when you look at it closely that you see that, yes, these are cars. A white-and-yellow-gold sailboat pin from the 1940s is less a reproduction of a cruising yacht than a statement about its speed: The stylized sails bulge aerodynamically, and the curling billows along its hull, spiked with single sapphires to indicate the color of the sea, add to the sense of movement. A utilitarian DC-3 airplane, the Ford of the skies in the 1940s and ’50s, appears as a simple, nearly unadorned lapel pin whose shape is its most important feature, with the diamond cabin windows and ruby and emerald wing lights (green for starboard, red for port) almost an afterthought.

Interestingly, the age of jet travel and frequent-flier miles hasn’t put an end to the fancy for such jewelry. Tiffany’s makes a beguiling series of travel charms that include a suitcase studded with precious-stone labels, a camera and even (for visitors to New York or for New Yorkers longing for a trip down memory lane) a Checker taxicab. And only recently Bulgari introduced its own limited-edition collection of 18-karat gold travel charms, which reproduce the street signs for the places where Bulgari shops are located: the Via dei Condotti, the Place Vendôme, New Bond Street, Ginza Street and Fifth Avenue.

It almost makes you want to get out your passport and book a ticket. Anyone for Paris?